U.S., Iran to Discuss Iraq in
Meeting

Fox News, July 24, 2007

Alireza Jafarzadeh

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar
Zebari announced that a second round of negotiations
between the American and Iranian ambassadors to Iraq
will take place soon. This meeting is a follow-up to
the talks held on May 28, an event that was widely
billed as historic but produced no reduction in the
violence in Iraq. After those meetings, American
Ambassador Ryan Crocker said that further
negotiations would depend on whether Iran acted to
fulfill its stated commitments to Iraq's stability
and security.

What has happened since the first talks? For
starters, the U.S. military has announced on six
separate occasions that Iran is increasing its
support for militias and death squads in Iraq; these
announcements support Gen. Petraeus' almost monthly
pronouncements that “Iran is more involved in Iraq
than we perceived one month ago.” Additionally, U.S.
troops have conducted about a dozen different raids
to capture Iranian agents in Iraq. On July 16, U.S.
forces captured an agent using a charity as a front
organization to smuggle Explosively Formed
Projectiles (EFPs) into Iraq, the No. 1 killer of
coalition troops. Another raid resulted in U.S.
troops capturing 27 Iranians, whom officials believe
are members of Iran's elite Qods Force. On July 19,
the U.S. military said that it captured a terrorist
with "close ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards
Corp-Qods Force" in a raid near Baqubah. The
captured terrorist is suspected of facilitating the
transport of weapons and personnel, including the
"flow of deadly EFPs into Iraq from Iran to be used
against Coalition Forces." On July 22, Coalition
Forces detained two suspected terrorists that may be
affiliated with the Qods Force in a raid near the
Iranian border East of Baghdad. A number of weapons
were confiscated during the raid.

At least four weapons caches have been discovered
since May 28, some of which included Iranian 240 mm
rockets, which U.S. officials say are the biggest
and longest-range weapons available to Shiite
extremists. One cache included 34 Iranian-made 107
mm rockets aimed at a U.S. military base. Even Iraqi
President Jalal Talabani, no foe of Tehran, has
urged Iran to reign in the Shiite militias driving
up violence in Iraq. And, after months of
equivocating, the U.S. military has finally stated
that Iranian agents helped plan the January raid in
Karbala that killed five U.S. soldiers.

The destruction that Iran has been able to level at
Iraq in just the past two months reveals the depth
of the Iranian regime's commitment in destabilizing
its neighbor. According to my sources, Tehran is
spending at least $70 million per month arming,
training and funding Iraqi militias fomenting
sectarian violence and attacking coalition troops.

This highlights the marked contradiction between
Tehran's actions and its words. Iranian officials,
including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have
expressed a desire to negotiate, yet their
motivation for doing so is not to aid the United
States but to buy time to speed up the violence in
Iraq. Tehran has two overarching aims in Iraq: to
establish a sister “Islamic Republic” and to
extinguish the only organized opposition it faces,
the Mujahedin-e Khalq or MEK. In addition to its
widespread network in Iran, the MEK is also present
in Iraq in Camp Ashraf. Achieving these goals will
let it solidify its hold on the region and bolster
the morale of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
(IRGC), the state's main repressive organ. The
latter is particularly important because the IRGC's
repression of ordinary Iranians is what keeps the
clerics in power; without the IRGC the regime could
not instill fear in the population nor contain the
ever-increasing number of anti-government
demonstrations throughout the country. Major
anti-government riots throughout Iran last June when
gas rationing was announced, showed Ahmadinejad's
vulnerability vis-ŕ-vis its own population and the
organized opposition.

Tehran is betting that if it can generate enough
chaos in Iraq, the U.S. Congress will push for
withdrawal, clearing the way for Tehran's ascendance
in Iraq.

Iran has no intention of cooperating with American
requests to tone down the chaos in Iraq. However, in
order to slow U.S. inclinations to comprehensively
clamp down on Iran's agents (something the U.S. is
reluctant to do because of the perceived potential
for reprisal from Iran), Tehran is fabricating
goodwill and requesting talks to buy more time and
drive out American troops. Tehran continues to
deploy the same tactic on the nuclear issue, keeping
negotiations sputtering while it races toward its
quest for a nuclear bomb.

Heeding Iran's call for further talks is a mistake.
The plethora of EFPs, rockets and funds pouring
across Iran's border into Iraq are evidence enough
of its intentions, and a few more hours of
diplomatic banter can do nothing to change that. To
the contrary, it could further embolden Tehran to
step up its violence in Iraq.

The international community can still win in Iraq,
but it must act quickly and decisively to sever the
Iranian regime's influence and bolster the moderate
elements in Iraq who oppose Islamic fundamentalism.
It can start by stepping up the arrest of the
regime's agents in Iraq; cutting off smuggling
routes for weapons, explosives and agents; disarming
the Shiite militias; and purging the Iraqi
government of Tehran's proxies — essentially
dismantling Iran's network in Iraq. This must be
coupled with empowering the moderate voices among
the Sunnis and Shiites and the formation of a
national unity government. Many moderate Iraqi
politicians, including some key members of the Iraqi
Parliament, believe that Iran's main opposition
group based in Ashraf City, Iraq would be the
catalyst for stability; it has played a crucial role
as a balancing weight against the Iranian regime's
influence in Iraq, and in helping out Iraq's
moderate Shiites and Sunnis.

Asked about Iraq, one general stated that whoever
wins there will be the new power broker in the
Persian Gulf. America can prevent Iran from winning
this role by stopping the real engine driving the
violence in Iraq — the mullahs in Tehran.

The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear Crisis by
Alireza Jafarzadeh